Searching for Masculinity

Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers

“Gentlemen, welcome to Fight Club.”

• Tyler Durden

Los Angeles. The top floor of a skyscraper. A man sits in a chair with a gun in his mouth. This is the narrator. He goes unnamed for the whole story. The one holding the gun is Tyler Durden. The narrator tells us that Tyler has planted bombs in a dozen skyscrapers, including the one that they are in. 

The film flashes back and the narrator rests in the arms of a crying tag with a name tag on his chest, reading “Bob”. They are in a support group for men with testicular cancer.

Fight Club, a film detailing an underground fighting organization that evolves into an anarchist terrorist movement, is about a generation of men who have lost their sense of identity, purpose, and independence. Fight Club examines how in modern day consumer culture, this loss leaves men vulnerable to feelings of insecure masculinity. Tyler Durden starts Fight Club because he believes that only in our darkest moments – blood spurting in a dim basement – do we know what it means to be alive. Though as viewers, we don’t want our blood spurting in a dark basement, the film makes us realize that life is not about sinking into our boring routines of work, sleep and repeat. Instead we must live, not let life slide by. However, as the movie progresses the idea of not blindly following consumerist culture starts to apply to more than just consumerist culture. Not blindly following becomes ever so relevant to the man who originally prompts us not to blindly follow: Tyler Durden. In 1999 it was IKEA catalogs, now it is social media influencers. Back then it was Tyler Durden, now it is Andrew Tate. 

When we are first introduced to the unnamed narrator, he tells us that he travels around the U.S. for his monotonous corporate job. The narrator has developed severe insomnia and becomes emotionally numb, leaving him disconnected from both himself and the world around him. When his doctor dismisses his complaints, saying that if the narrator wants to see true suffering he should attend a support group for people with severe illnesses, the narrator does exactly that. 

The narrator doesn’t actually have testicular cancer but it is at these support groups that he discovers the remedy to his insomnia: crying. Surrounded by sobbing people who are confronting their own emotions the narrator does the same. He then finds that he is finally able to sleep. It is here, with the narrator being in the arms of “Bob”, that Fight Club begins to comment on lost identity.

Insecure Masculinity

“We’re still men.” 

• Robert Paulsen

Robert Paulsen has testicular cancer. The disease came from his excessive use of steroids during his weight lifting career. He spent years chasing a masculine physique and ended up causing irreparable damage to his body. He emasculated himself. 

The search for masculinity resonates throughout Fight Club. Men try to convince themselves that they are “still men”, not because they’re suffering from testicular cancer but because they share a sense of lost identity. It is important to understand that for many of these men what they consider to be their masculinity is their identity. When the unnamed narrator attends these support groups for testicular cancer he relates to these men. The reason for his lost identity, however, stems from his inherent consumerist lifestyle. While making the constant trips from place to place he finds himself becoming obsessed with the IKEA catalog. 

“Like so many others, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct”

• Narrator

This obsession acts as a coping mechanism that fills his void of identity. Instead of addressing the cause of his insomnia, he manufactures this false identity by deciding which dining set defines him as a person or which carpet fits him best. It is at this point in his life that he meets the personification of the antithesis to this consumerist philosophy. 

A Slave to Society 

“The things you own end up owning you”

• Tyler Durden

On a flight home from one of his work trips, the unnamed narrator meets Tyler Durden. Tyler is a soap salesman who, like the narrator, spends his days travelling from place to place. He also has an absent father, and a lack of identity. Their situations are strikingly similar, but, in their responses to their circumstances, they are opposites. The narrator bathes in his emasculated nature and history while Tyler completely rejects his.

Tyler Durden hates the consumerism that runs rampant across society. He hates material wealth. He hates material possessions. Just after the narrator meets Tyler on the plane, his apartment suddenly burns down, leaving him without his IKEA sofa, his carpet or all the other things in his catalogue. With no friends or family to turn to, the man calls Tyler. This is where the soap salesman’s true philosophy comes to light.

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything” 

• Tyler Durden

In our modern society material possessions often equate to self identity. We decide what to buy based on who we think we are until what we buy becomes who we are. We lose track of ourselves. Tyler tries to demonstrate to the narrator that his apartment burning down was a blessing in disguise. He has been freed from being a ‘slave to the IKEA nesting instinct’. 

Starting Fight Club

“I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

• Tyler Durden

The two protagonists stand in an empty lot, where Tyler tells the narrator to hit him. Why would someone willingly ask someone else to hurt them?  It is absurd but that is precisely the point. Fight Club is a movie about fighting. Yet it isn't a movie telling us to fight. Instead it uses fighting as an extreme example of rebellion: A rebellion against the destruction of self. 

For the narrator, fighting offers a feeling that his consumerist life could not offer: one of being alive. His life is comfortable yet it is empty. Tyler Durden shows the narrator that sometimes in order to avoid emptiness one must be uncomfortable. Fighting is uncomfortable but it is impossible to experience passively. Fighting becomes the means through which the narrator rejects his numbing lifestyle. In the fight, he is no longer a consumer or an employee. He is simply a person experiencing the world directly.

The two person fight club soon expands and the empty lot in which they fight becomes filled with people, all drawn to escape from their lives. Why do so many people find this philosophy attractive? Not only this philosophy but the means with which they act on this philosophy too? Fighting restores a sense of agency in these men, men who feel powerless in their everyday lives. 

Within the context of our modern day society this has not gotten any better. Our society has become more and more dependent on consumerist ideals. Social media has enabled such a large boom in the industry of advertisements. This new disposable form of content has allowed for our lives to be even more inculcated with goods.

A Slave to Tyler Durden

“Why was Tyler Durden building an army? To what purpose? For what greater good? In Tyler we trusted.”

• Narrator

Tyler Durden suggests something that all of these men desperately wanted to hear without knowing it. He suggests that their feelings of inadequacy are not personal failures. They are consequences of a society that encourages them to measure their worth through possessions and success. Tyler turns all of these men’s private insecurities into one collective grievance.

However this is where it all becomes confused. Tyler encourages these men to question the lines that society has drawn for them but he presents himself as the one with all the answers. He tells the men to free themselves from society yet they become more and more reliant on him to provide these answers. The authority of consumer culture is swapped out for the authority of Tyler Durden. 

Tyler’s appeal rests on a contradiction. He encourages these men to be independent but not independent without him. His rejection of conformity becomes another form of conformity. It is here that Fight Club becomes a warning to all of us to not blindly follow a leader. The relevance of this warning extends more than we realize into our society today. Charismatic men have built figures by presenting themselves as an authority of masculinity. Andrew Tate, Sneako, Charlie Kirk and even Donald Trump pump our society with this philosophy: ‘Your masculinity has been taken away from you!’ ‘Are you lonely and directionless? Well that's not your fault, it is society’s’

Although Tyler Durden’s base philosophy has merit, and some could argue that Tate’s, Sneako’s, Kirk’s and Trump’s do too, their actual means of exploiting people to combat this extends far beyond saving masculinity. They build a crowd of people who blindly follow their word, similarly to those in Project Mayhem with Tyler Durden. With this following they exploit and they begin to instil ideals that are problematic. With Tate it’s sexism and xenophobia, with Tyler it’s terrorism.

We watch as members of Fight Club develop the ability to question society but only do so in losing their ability to question another human being. They lose their name and are called space monkeys. They plant bombs at the base of a dozen skyscrapers across the city. This seems crazy while watching the movie yet at the same time millions defend Andrew Tate’s sexual abuse, they defend Trump’s rape cases. It is on a smaller scale but the context is the same and sexual abuse is arguably not any less wrong of an act.  So why do we refuse to address the problem? The answer is simply because the prevalence of this insecure masculinity is so strong. Men feel directionless. Men feel lonely. Men feel lost. Men create someone to blame. They create someone to follow.

We Are Tyler Durden

“Because we’re the same person.”

• Narrator

At the end of the movie we discover that Tyler Durden and the narrator are the exact same person. The narrator held the gun in his own mouth, the narrator punched his own face, the narrator burned his own apartment down. Dissociative Identity Disorder plagued the narrator's mind and because of this he creates this alter ego. He creates a figure who he can look up to and this figure creates people to blame. We are no different. Voters across the United States have constructed a version of Trump that simply is not indicative of who he actually is, instead it is indicative of who they want him to be. We admire our friends yet at the same time choose to ignore the traits in our friends that we find immoral. 

This will not do. If we ignore, if we construct, we will end up blindly following. When we refuse to see the problem we are at our most vulnerable. We cannot choose to see what we want to see. If we do we will end up like those in Project Mayhem or like those tuning in to every Andrew Tate stream. Blindly following consumerist ideals strips us of our identity but blindly following leaders does too. 

At the end of the movie we return to the skyscraper. The narrator shoots himself in the mouth and watches as the skyscraper he sits in crumbles to the ground. The narrator attempts to free himself from Tyler, but his attempt to escape the identity he has constructed ultimately threatens his autonomy. To escape Tyler, the Narrator had to confront himself. Fight Club serves as the ultimate reminder to fight, not with our fists, but for who we are.